Hereinafter, a meeting is a gathering of human participants with an objective to discuss and resolve issues surrounding a subject-matter or entity. The subject-matter or entity of a meeting is collectively and interchangeably referred to herein as a “topic”. Participants participate in a meeting by contributing information in any suitable form, including but not limited to text, human speech, audio, video, multimedia, or some combination thereof.
Natural language is written or spoken language having a form that is employed by humans for primarily communicating with other humans or with systems having a natural language interface.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique that facilitates exchange of information between humans and data processing systems. For example, one branch of NLP pertains to transforming human readable content into machine usable data. For example, NLP engines are presently usable to accept input content such as a newspaper article or human speech, and produce structured data, such as an outline of the input content, most significant and least significant parts, a subject, a reference, dependencies within the content, and the like, from the given content.
Another branch of NLP pertains to answering questions about a subject matter based on information available about the subject matter domain. This is the branch of cognitive analytics, and is also referred to as a Question and Answer system (Q and A system). Cognitive analytics is the process of analyzing available information or knowledge to create, infer, deduce, or derive new information.
A cognitive system (referred to herein as a “cog”) is an implementation of a Q and A system. A Q and A system is an artificial intelligence application executing on data processing hardware. A Q and A system answers questions pertaining to a given subject-matter domain presented in natural language.
Typically, a Q and A system is provided access, or trained with, to a collection of domain specific information based on which the Q and A system answers questions pertaining to that domain. For example, a Q and A system accesses a body of knowledge about the domain, where the body of knowledge (knowledgebase) can be organized in a variety of configurations. For example, a knowledgebase of a domain can include structured repository of domain-specific information, such as ontologies, or unstructured data related to the domain, or a collection of natural language documents about the domain.